The subject application relates to toner estimation and reporting for a printing device. While the systems and methods described herein relate toner estimation, it will be appreciated that the described techniques may find application in other resource cost estimation systems, other resource consumption reporting applications, and/or other printing systems.
Users of a printer can benefit from being able to estimate the amount of toner needed for a given print a job, before the job is printed. Such information is useful for billing purposes and cost estimation, and for large jobs it is useful for inventory control. Because the amount consumed is highly printer specific, and depends on the job content, estimates based on page count are inaccurate. Classical methods for estimating tone consumption use the entire print job, which may be very computationally expensive, particularly since jobs for which estimates are needed tend to be long jobs. Such methods describe the calculation without reference to how the user might select the calculation or how the resulting information is presented. Information of toner consumption is useful even to users operating on a pure click-charge basis, so that they may be able to pre-order materials in advance of a large job.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,204,699 addresses converting from bit coverage to material consumption in the single separation case. U.S. Pat. No. 5,383,129 addresses taking computed materials and converts to costs and/or prices. U.S. Pat. No. 6,356,359 addresses using a reduced resolution image. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,604,578 and 5,592,298 relate to taking a subset of image pixels to compute the coverage statistically. U.S. Pat. No. 7,359,088 relates to printing, scanning, and estimating the coverage from the scan, calculating the coverage from the bitmap, and printing the calculated result on the document. US Application 2008/0075480 A1 addresses a model of halftone dot growth to predict toner consumption. However, all of these techniques are susceptible to inaccuracies when dealing with interacting color separations.
Accordingly, there is an unmet need for systems and/or methods that facilitate estimating and reporting toner consumption for a printer to a user, while overcoming the aforementioned deficiencies.